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11 thoughts on “A Fertility Story: (Warning, image heavy)”

At the risk of being a bit repetitive, the West killed their god 150 years ago. Without G-d, the smart have become Nietzsche’s Last Men (a human version of the Beautiful Ones from the rat heaven experiment) and have ceased to strive or reproduce. The dumb continue to exist on a primitive level, but I doubt will be able to maintain the technology needed for their survival without social breakdown and mass warfare/starvation. What’s probable is that the smart are going through an evolutionary bottleneck. Those who emerge on the other end will be smart and religious, likely to have 6+ children per family, and will inherit the earth.

The UN chart showing its population projections is somewhat deceptive. The middle projection assumes that all countries have replacement level reproductive rates (ca. 2.1 children per woman), and it shows an increasing world population due to age structure. The low estimate uses current reproductive rates, and it is the curve we are actually following.

Agriculture requires stability and future time orientation. Industrialization does to an extent as well. Our current selective pressures are towards the opposite. If we have any agency it will be to decide on a pastoral culture versus a hunter-gatherer culture, since post modernity will likely look like one or both of them.

This is hardly fair. Large swathes of Africa have indigenous agriculture. True, it’s a shitty, half-assed, touch-and-go kind of agriculture by European historical (and pre-historical) standards, but it does exist.